Since he first exhibited in the late 1970s Thomas Nyqvist (Porvoo, 1955) has been well known for his profound engagement with painting as a system of thought, a tradition of knowledge and a practice marked by continuous change. The painted image, and especially painted space, is his medium and his message. For Nyqvist painting is not a small, sealed-off world of its own but a microcosm of more or less manageable format, wide open to the big unknown.

Perhaps lesser known is his interest in lens-based imagery as an alternative ’discipline’ (although this term should be taken with a grain of salt in any art context) for observing and influencing reality, as specialised and demanding as painting. To make photography and painting enrich and challenge each other, Nyqvist has long used his own snapshots as visual sources for meditations in oil on canvas on built and ruined spaces.